She wants to be an electrical engineer. Her family can't afford the application fees for half the school she'd need to apply to, let alone tuition. She's probably going to end up doing hair, not because she doesn't have the mind for something else, but because nobody ever gave her a door to walk through. He looked directly at Marcus. Now, I got lucky today.
I got lucky because a motorcycle broke down in a way that happened to need exactly the kind of thinking my dad spent years teaching me for free in a garage because he loved me enough to bother. Most kids like me don't get a $5.9 million motorcycle to prove themselves on. Most kids like me just disappear into whatever life doesn't require anybody to notice them.
The garage had gone very quiet. "So here's what I want to do with the money," Ethan said, voice studying. "Now that the hardest part was out. I don't want a mansion. I don't want a car collection.
I don't even really want to leave Flagstaff if I'm honest. My dad needs help at the shop and I like it there. He glanced at Marcus. I want to build something that finds kids like me. Kids like that boy sweeping floors.
Kids like that girl who can wire a whole house in her head. Not based on grades. Not based on test scores. Based on whether they can look at something broken and actually see it. And I want to give them a real shot. training tools, mentorship, a path into real careers, the kind of thing nobody ever offered any of us. Marcus stared at him for a long moment, and something was working behind his weathered face that none of them could quite read yet.
"You're 17," Dutch said quietly, not dismissively, just genuinely marveling. "You just secured the biggest payday of your life about 20 minutes ago, and you're already planning to give a chunk of it away to strangers." "Not give it away," Ethan corrected. "Invest it in people." I think that's actually smarter than most of what people do with money like this.
He looked back at Marcus. But I can't build something like that alone. I'm 17. I don't have connections. I don't have a reputation.
I don't have anything except the money and an idea. You've got a whole club full of people who respect you. You've got a name that means something. If I did this alone, it'd be a nice gesture that helped maybe five kids before it ran out of steam. If we did it together, he stopped himself, suddenly aware of how presumptuous the sentence sounded out loud.